In Niger and Nigeria, men who want more than their legally permitted four wives are buying women and girls to use as ‘unofficial’ wives. These women are resented by the ‘legal’ wives and face a life of endless work, cruelty and attempts to flee in destitution in the hope of starting a new life, according to a new Anti-Slavery report.

NIAMEY , Jul 30 2013 (IPS) - For El Hadji Souley Moussa, a 60-year-old retired bank employee in Niger, “marrying off a daughter when she is young is a source of great pride. This way, she is protected from pregnancy outside of marriage.”

It is no wonder that a population and health survey conducted in 2012 by the Ministry of Public Health, and released this July, revealed that 75 percent of girls get married before the age of 18 in this Sahelien country of 16 million inWest Africa. According to the study, young girls aged between 15 and 19 years are the most vulnerable.

Each day before the reaping, the 11-year-old girl walked between the stunted stalks of millet with a sense of mounting dread. In a normal year, the green shoots vaulted out of the ground and rose as high as 13 feet (4 meters), a wall tall enough to conceal an adult man. This time, they only reached her waist. Even the tallest plant in her family's plot barely grazed her shoulder. Zali could feel the tug of the invisible thread tying her fate to that of the land. As the world closed in around her, she knew that this time the bad harvest would mean more than just hunger.

REFEPA’s goal in this project was to give voice to women to assert their rights to property and inheritance in the context of State laws, Muslim laws and customary laws. The project undertook action research in two sites – Hamdallahi and Kollo Zarma – and used the following strategies to achieve the above goal:

This is an educational kit comprising 8 thematic papers, that is complementary to a film about the Lessons Learned from Niger’s Rural Code. The papers are meant to encourage viewers to look further into some of the topics that the film deals with, and provide practical data (facts and figures, diagrams, maps, etc…) about the reality of Niger’s Rural Code. They are a key tool for moderators to lead discussions with the audience and go further into the debate.